Weekend Open Forum: Your most outdated software?

Software developers have a knack for shooting themselves in the foot. In the name of progress, they introduce irrelevant features, clunky interfaces and shady monetization schemes. Before you know it,…

I agree with using old versions of PSP - I actually have a portable version I wheel out when I need to do some photo editing.

My old skool software which is installed on ALL of my machines is Acdsee 9... after v9 they screwed up the look of the thing, removed functionality etc etc. Although if I were to be brutally honest, the best version was Acdsee 5 which bundled with picaview (right click image preview) saw me through many years of photo viewing!

Great question for an open topic forum. For me, my favorite is Print Artist Classic, version 3 of what is now morphed into version 24. PA was bundled with an Epson 500 printer in about 1996 and was phenomenal in its simplicity and power for graphic and text manipulation. While PA Classic won't run on Windows 7 and I've long ago graduated to CorelDraw, whenever I fire up XP for a quick hit production, I still marvel at how neat PA Classic still is.

Wow, no kidding Steve? Hehe, does W98 in virtual machine counts? I guess the oldest I have is Turbo C, gives me less headaches than Dev-C and is lighter than other programs like Eclipse, Visual Studio [damn, that one sucks in stability and performance] or NetBeans.

- ModPlugPlayer for playing my tracker/MOD music perfectly. Surprisingly still works well on Win7.
- AutoCAD 2006 over the newer AutoCADs.
- I still use the now defunct CDisplay program for reading comics in convenient CBZ and CBR formats.
- For the longest time, while people were using Media Player Classic, I just ended up installing my codecs and filters correctly and used the Windows Media Player 6.4 still available on WinXP (type "mplayer2" in your Run box). I only ended up moving to MPC after a long while because of some rather minor improvements over what I mainly used it for. And on Win7 machines.

I think this kind of nostalgia is the result of either a lack of will or a compulsive inability to learn new things. As with the infamous "Women and the VCR" ordeal, or old people and... well, everything. There's absolutely nothing some age-old lump of sofware-cancer can do that the newest version available today cannot!

The ONLY thing I can possibly think of, is drivers (in certain scenarios). Sometimes new drivers are bugged or don't perform as well as older drivers. But give it a few months and there will be another driver version out which fixes the problem.

I'm not even gonna start on what kind of psychosis makes you guys use Windows Classic Theme. AMG it's so haxxorz! Please...

i still use office 2002 cause i was last non fisher price looking office version i also was trained and passed the core office certification for all of office. also still use windows xp pro sp3 on two labtops cause they from 2004 and well not upgrade to windows 7. i still a few games that i got from 1995-1998 on virtural os windows ME

I have a "old" ThinkPad made by IBM back in 1998 that my Mom gave me when she got a new laptop when I was in elementary school. Still works, the battery barely holds a charge though, and it's been surpassed in every measurable test.

Call me sentimental but it was the first laptop I ever had and I don't have the heart to throw it out because of that.

I'm still using a 2002 version of OmniGraffle (although now I have to run it on an old iBook, as OSX 10.7 no longer supports PPC binaries). I never updated this version, but not because the new version has a bad interface or anything, but just because the first version was just perfect!